Kathmandu, March 23 -- This is a wretched tale about revolting people. This is also an empathetic account of needful humans.

British Author Daisy Johnson's debut novel Everything Under is both of these things and a hundred more myths, folklore, legends, psyches and defamiliarisations.

At 29, Johnson is well-known as the youngest writer to make the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, and no wonder.

Everything Under begins as an ordinary, contemporary story. A daughter has been reunited with her difficult mother after a 15-year hunt. As they are learning to fit into their exasperating companionship, there is a lifetime worth of stories to be told. This is what the novel does, showing, not telling us about how the mother-daughter duo ende...